Nick Pinkerton

The proximity of horrible headlines scarcely matters - released on any day of any calendar year, Gangster Squad would be a crime against cinematic sensibility.

On every level this production - from Robinson's callow performance to Vila's hackneyed handheld camerawork, punching beats in the stead of the actors - remains firmly on the level of the obvious.

The Apparition is not a great or even good haunted-house movie, but it does have the advantage of a memorable setting.

It is dreary to envisage the viewer who could become emotionally involved in The Victim, but it does have the kind of slack watchability - lugubrious driving scenes and girl-talk flashbacks pad the movie toward feature length - that make for good late-night TV.

That even the criminal class has gone sensitive and finicky eco-conscious has some potential for comedy-or drama, as in Oliver Stone's undervalued Savages-but there's no single detail that might convince a viewer that the characters played by Dax Shepard and Bradley Cooper might ever have been compelled to steal for a living, and this alienates the crime picture from any social context or sense of actual danger, making it essentially a celebrity goof-off.

Christian "Direct-to-Video" Slater lends not a shred of credibility to the role of Craig MacKenzie.

It is absolutely terrible.

A cinematic event. It's not every day, after all, that you get to see two great American traditions - guitar/bass/drums rock music and Tin Pan Alley musical theater - so thoroughly, mutually degraded.

Add to this that it takes place in the town of Merkin, and you'll get an idea of the labored spirit of dirty-old-man humor that prevails.

It is plodding, lazily filmed, gassy with James Horner's score, and pads its runtime only by way of tolling repetition.

It can't sustain interest in the endless unraveling of Molly's psyche, which, as handled by Sánchez, has all the interest of watching an inexplicably untreated wound fester.

A Little Bit of Heaven demands miracles of its cast to keep proceedings from becoming grindingly mawkish and does not get them.

It's a pathetic missed opportunity - and one occasion of actually going broke by underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

Arguably a good lesson for kids about preserving our environment, To the Arctic is definitely a threat to our equally endangered good taste.

It's one of the most obnoxious movies ever made.

Taken together, the whole thing is good for approximately one laugh, generated by the shabbiest CGI reptile since "Anaconda."

It's an overloaded, overwrought, profligate production inclined to hysteria and, in cumulative effect, something like being pelted with scenes until buried alive - but it helps keep it from being boring.

The forced horseplay is entirely without ensemble chemistry, probably because the leads were hired principally as singers/musicians, as this, the directorial debut of former Law & Order: Criminal Intent star Vincent D'Onofrio, is that rarest of mongrel movies: a slasher/musical.

Neither intellectually nor viscerally engaging, what The Divide finally offers audiences is the not-terribly-edifying, stagnant experience of being locked in a basement with a pack of assholes.

Rid of Me is a bad movie, but at least it's a flailing, innocent badness.

It's impossible to imagine how anything this convoluted could have already earned a sequel, but it has.

Weixler is an alert, mobile comedienne who deserves better than this awkward pause, nervous stammer, social-anxiety comedy.

If the success of epic storytelling were determined by the sheer number of unnecessary on-screen name tags, 1911 would be a masterpiece. But the small matters of characterization, audience identification, and scene-making are entirely absent here.

A pretend poison pen letter to Hollywood sleaze and excess, Prince of Swine is in fact Toma's application to join the club - hopefully denied.

This crude, overlong chunk of kung-fu kitsch lays its scene in a 1920s Republican China, torn by internecine fighting and weighed down by drably expensive production design.

Graynor is a muddle of kooky indie girlfriend and materialistic fortune hunter; Hanks has neither threat nor pathos at his command.

It is part of the film's premise that the movies are only a pretext to serve personal needs. Given how little the murky finished product offers an outside audience, this comes across all too convincingly.

The film is a burdensome two hours.

The enjoyable moments are limited to Alison Brie, funny as Sidney's publicist, and the final recasting of the movie as a backstage diva drama. As ever, the self-reflexive horror stuff is superficial, loveless, and constant-a ladled-on sauce to disguise what you're eating.

Your Highness plays like a dirty-joke blooper reel made by the cast of a junky sword-and-sorcery epic.

The most avid fans of merciless mugging will be the sole admirers of the bookending story of Liu Xiaoye's Butcher.

Cage's avenger is named Milton; this reference to the author of Paradise Lost is the sole hint that Old World culture ever existed in Drive Angry's convoy of hyperbolized-unto-parody Americana: bad drawls, obese gawkers, roadhouse demonology, coochie-cutter shorts, and engines revving under guitar stomp.

It is draggily paced and lacks felicity of form; the 3-D is a rip-off and the songs are pap, save a snippet of Etta James singing "At Last" while Bieber's glossy fringe sways in slow-motion.

Sauvaire, hesitating between a protest picture and a glam-squalid imagist orgy, only succeeds in scattering human rubble across the screen.

Game performances and a couple of half-laughs, sure, but this is the screen comedy equivalent of the televised Yule log.

When every injury is repaid with interest, this self-destroying work has nowhere to go but to the credits. Such symmetry is a dismal, barbarian sort of perfection.

It's obvious that Nolan either can't articulate or doesn't believe in a distinction between living feelings and dreams--and his barren Inception doesn't capture much of either.

Every gag is smothered by the prevailing tone of labored zaniness and generic, plucky "mischief music" alerting discerning viewers to abandon all hope of laughter.

All might be good for a flask-to-the-theater laugh, if not for the unconscionable price gouging.

Bracingly inept.

Ball, who can't conceive of human motives beyond the hypertrophic, smutty sexuality that's his stock in trade, primly divides his characters into avatars of Sick Repression or Healthy Liberation.

Ten interviews with 10 "name" American and European directors--including Todd Haynes, David Lynch, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Catherine Breillat--diced into a documentary as asinine and fawning as its title suggests.

While Sandler has never trafficked in epigrammatic wit, there's a difference between, say, Billy Madison's "Of course I peed my pants--everyone my age pees their pants" or "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry's" shakedown of hetero squeamishness, and this lazy stuff--the difference between smart-dumb and plain-dumb.

An unnecessary retelling of rock's dingiest "legend"--ever get the feeling you've been cheated?